Welcome to my blog! I hope to capture some of my preparation musing and travel during my Great Divide bike ride summer of 2016.
What is the Great Divide mountain bike route? It is North America's premier long distance mountain bike route. The full route starts in Banff, Alberta, Canada, and ends on the Mexico border in Antelope Wells New Mexico. The whole route is nearly 2800 miles, with about 86% dirt/gravel road, 12% paved road, and about 2% single track, with nearly 200,000" of elevation gain. My current planning does not include doing the entire route, but about 2000 to 2100 miles of it starting near Butte or Helena MT.
While there are guided supported trips that can be joined that avail the participants to many of the small town amenities along the way, I plan on doing this solo, with some sag wagon support for the first couple of weeks. This does present a set of challenges in research, planning and preparation in order to maximize the chances of a successful endeavor. Pre trip posts will share some of my diggings and decisions in these area.
When contemplating such an endeavor, one has to be honest with ones abilities, and outdoor world view. While there exists an intense race every year with top notch riders doing this whole route in 2 to 3 weeks, it is not a race for me. After a few multi day, long distance bike trips, I have decided I am not a cadence monitoring, pelaton oriented biker, but bit more tilted to the meanderer side of the spectrum more interested in the journey along the way, rather than an endpoint and stopwatch fixated racer. So I plan on exploring a bit along the way, dwelling in various areas when the soul is moved (or the body demands!) I expect that this will take roughly 2 months from start to end. While I'm sure I will meet some new friends along the way, I also invite friends and family (bikers or not) to join up for a day or few here and there. As I said, it is not a race, and a day (biking or not) spent with friends is always a good investment in life, especially in the backcountry and mountain towns to salve our modern souls. For my Colorado based friends, the route goes through Steamboat, Summit County/Breckenridge, Salida/Marshall Pass, Del Norte, and Platoro, with some interesting stops along the way. Rough timeline has this for a couple of weeks in mid August, though subject to adjustments as the journey unfolds. If you have interest, just drop me a note and we can see if something works out.
Finally, thanks to Jay for my first awareness exposure to this route via an emailed blog link several years ago. The seed is sprouting!
